Weekend woes of a wild bunch

WEEKENDS in the early 1970s were tough in our home. Even at 7 am, six children would be wriggling under blankets, pretending to sleep and dreading the morning routine. We lived in Thoothukudi in the southern part of Tamil Nadu, where my dad worked as a college lecturer.

At that time, our family of four children expanded when my aunt came to stay with us for nearly a year, along with her two sons who were about our age. Managing six energetic children in a small house couldn’t have been easy; so, our parents and grandparents laid down rules to keep us in line.

One rule was the Saturday oil bath ritual, which we all hated. One by one, we would be slathered in oil by my paternal grandmother, a caring but no-nonsense woman who tolerated no escape attempts. After the oil application, we had to wait for 30 long minutes without moving around the house, lest we made the place slippery.

Inevitably, we would hover near the old copper boiler in the back of the house, fascinated by the crackling coal or wood shavings that fuelled it. But every time we got too close, grandma would pull us back with a tough grip, mainly out of concern for our safety.

Sundays brought a different kind of torture: neem paste. Each child had to swallow a small ball of this bitter green paste, ground manually on the grinding stone from fresh neem leaves. It was meant to keep our stomachs worm-free. Anyone refusing the neem paste had an alternative —a spoonful of castor oil. It was a classic ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’ kind of choice. Most of us picked the neem, braving its bitterness for the reward of a spoonful of honey. As we scattered in every direction to avoid the treatment, the elders would chase each of us down.

One day, my cousin tried to protest the neem treatment and was swiftly disciplined with a tiny drop of onion juice in his eyes. Furious, he blamed my elder sister for provoking him, insisting that she should suffer the same fate. She ended up teary-eyed, both before and after her ‘sentence.’

Occasionally, we had fun tasks, like the annual tradition of repainting steel chairs. Just like Tom Sawyer, we relished this responsibility. In our maiden attempt, we mixed a lot of paint thinner. When a guest sat down, his dhoti was glued to the still-wet paint. As he struggled to stand, the dhoti took most of our hard work with it. Watching him squirm in discomfort, we kids couldn’t hold back our laughter!